The Media Favors Trump

By Wornie Reed, Ph.D.

Remarkably, the media keeps finding ways to favor Trump. Yes, they sane wash Trump’s inexplicable ramblings. And yes, they fail to note many of his outrageous lies.

But they have continued their pattern of going further. They cover the Trump campaign more than the Democrat opponent, just as they did in 2016 when it was Trump versus Hillary Clinton.

In the final weeks of the current presidential campaign, major newspapers are giving Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection only a fraction of the coverage they gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in 2016.

Media Matters reviewed print coverage in five major newspapers – the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post – for stories mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week following U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s October 2, 2024, unsealing of special counsel Jack Smith’s latest filing, which revealed damning new evidence of the former president’s alleged crimes. Media Matters researchers found that the papers ran 26 combined articles mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week after the unsealing of Smith’s filing. However, those same papers published 100 combined articles – nearly four times as many – that mentioned Clinton’s server in the week after then FBI Director James Comey’s notorious October 28, 2018, letter on new developments.

This differential news coverage matters. Obsessive news coverage of the Clinton server issue in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign helped Trump to victory. Comey eventually announced that no charges were warranted in the Clinton case. However, the damage had already been done. Post-election analysis of the polling data confirmed that Comey’s announcement and the subsequent deluge of news coverage swung the election in Trump’s favor. I reported on that data analysis here.

Once again, comparatively speaking, Trump is getting a pass.

On Tuesday, October 8, in the Columbia Journalism Review, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter outlined Trump’s longstanding attack on the U.S. media as “fake news,” an attack that is ongoing and obvious. They note that in his attacks on the media, Trump is following the pattern of authoritarians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who attacked media critics with audits, investigations, and harassment until he “drove independent media from the field.” They also note the observation of Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, that power is often freely given to an authoritarian in anticipation of punishment, what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”

In Public Notice, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is…still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns. She has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, in addition to the presidential debate with ABC News. And she appeared on 60 Minutes.

With Trump refusing to participate in another presidential debate, Vice President Harris accepted CNN’s invitation to a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania. In the announcement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon noted that Trump has confined his recent appearances to conservative media.

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Trump backed out of the 60 Minutes interview and has appeared only on the shows of loyalists. Yet, as Berlatsky points out, he is not receiving criticism similar to that of Harris. Indeed, observers note that Trump has tended to get far more favorable coverage than his mental slips, open embrace of Nazi racism, fantastical lies, and criminal indictments deserve.

Why does an insurrectionist and convicted felon get more favorable press treatment than the Vice President?